


Eight O'Clock On the Dot

by YamiTami



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Based on a Tumblr Post, F/M, Gen, Sad with a Happy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-11
Updated: 2014-05-11
Packaged: 2018-01-24 09:01:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1599224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YamiTami/pseuds/YamiTami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy goes to the Stork Club, eight on the dot, to both remember and forget. </p><p><a href="http://yamitamiko.tumblr.com/post/85428339544/snitchwings-atwellling-suescape-she">Inspired by this Tumblr thread</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eight O'Clock On the Dot

He’s seen that look often enough. People go to a club to celebrate, to live, but there’s also a bar and people go to a bar to drown their woes. There’s a certain look that comes with love lost. Sometimes it’s from a Dear John, sometimes it’s from a ‘To Whom It May Concern’, but whatever the reason or intensity the grief is the same. There’s anger and regret and sadness and sometimes they’ll be okay in five songs and sometimes they’ll take it to their grave but even though it always looks different it always looks the same.

He sees her come in, the beautiful brunette in the red dress, and by the time she takes her seat at the end of his bar he has her regular in front of her. She thanks him, quietly, and gazes out at the room. She’s positioned so she can easily watch both the dance floor and the door. it’s not ten minutes and some fellow slides by and asks her to dance. She says that she’s waiting for someone. He moves on to more willing partners. The bartender sighs.

This is the fifth Saturday she’s sat in the Stork Club waiting for her man to arrive. The bartender, he knows the look of loss well and she wears it plain as day even in the dim room. He doubts that her man is ‘late’ because he broke up with her. She seems like a strong sort of woman who would love a soldier who would die in a way that got you a medal pinned to your coffin. Her man must have promised to take her dancing and now he’ll never make the date.

The bartender keeps an eye on her, fills her drink when she needs it. She’s not drowning her sorrows, she’s not trying to drink herself and her memories into oblivion. She’s doing pretty well, he thinks. The wound is still fresh by even by the fifth visit he can see that she’s healing. It’s going to be hard, and the scar will always itch, but she’s healing. She’ll be okay. The bartender is glad. Not all of them are okay in the end.

But now, on this fifth Saturday, the cut is still fresh and she turns down all the young men asking her to dance. Few are foolish enough to ask twice. A few are full enough of themselves to think that all she needs is a push and are met by a steely, icy stare that sends them running faster than they would in the face of an entire Panzer division. They get the message, one way or another, and by this fifth Saturday she’s become enough of a regular fixture that most of them already know not to ask her and even warn the newcomers that here’s no point in asking the pretty lady in the red dress to dance.

The pretty lady in the red dress doesn’t dance. She waits.

And so it happened that only one half-drunk fool stumbled over to her ten minutes after she arrived, and after that she was left to sit with her drink and her sadness, all the way until one of the last songs of the evening. The bartender watched the American soldier walk forward with slow, uncertain purpose, his target clearly the lady in red. The bartender sighed. Yet another scared young man barking up the wrong tree. Yet another question that the lady in red would answer the same way.

When the young American soldier reached her, her painted lips were already parting.

"I’m sorry, but I’m waiting for—"

But then the young American soldier did something unexpected. He didn’t ask her to dance.

"I know. A lot of us are waiting for him."

The lady in red’s eyes went wide.

"Sorry, I just…" the soldier rubbed his neck, looked at the floor and then at the ceiling, before continuing in the same stumbling drawl, "I saw the two of you, you know, when he busted through the fortifications that had us mired down for months, saved us all… when they carried us back to passable civilization I happened to see you greet him, with his C.O., right? I sort of figured… I mean, we all know when it happened."

The bartender’s hands pause on the glass he’s washing, doing a poor imitation of his job while pretending not to be listening intently to the conversation.

"And I’d never… we’re all waiting for him to get here, right? And I’d never take his dance. But maybe it would be okay if I bought you a cup of coffee? For being… for being part of… ever what it was that got us out of that hell."

The soldier looks at her, ready to bolt, and the bartender watches her expression go from shocked to suspicious to something a little softer. At last the pretty lady in the dress as red as all the blood spilled in the trenches and oceans and skies across all the world answers him.

"That would be… all right."

Ten months later they held the reception to their wedding in the Stork Club. The newlyweds danced a happy jig for their first dance, with all the hope of a world that might soon be rid of this horrible war, the way a new couple ought start their lives together in a world turned upside down and inside out.

But first, before her husband joined her, the bride stood in the middle of an empty dancefloor. She watched the time and at eight o’cock on the dot she turned to the band and asked them to play something slow. Before she danced with her husband to every lively, hopeful tune the band knew, first… the bride danced alone.


End file.
